Opinions

Banking on Reputation


On August 15, 1931, the following statement was issued, ‘The Governor of the Bank of England has been indisposed as a result of the exceptional strain to which he has been subjected in recent months. Acting on medical advice, he has abandoned all work and has gone abroad for rest and change.’ The governor was Montagu Collet Norman, DSO – having repeatedly turned down a title, he was not, as so many people assumed, Sir Montagu Norman or Lord Norman. But he did take great pride in that DSO after his name – the Distinguished Service Order….

It is difficult so many years after these events to recapture the power and prestige of Montagu Norman in that period. But, at the time, he was considered the most influential central banker in the world, according to The New York Times, the ‘monarch of [an] invisible empire’. For Jean Monnet, godfather of the EU, the Bank of England was then ‘the citadel of citadels’ and ‘Montagu Norman was the man who governed the citadel. He was redoubtable.’ Over the previous decade, he and the heads of the three other major central banks had been part of what the newspapers had dubbed ‘the most exclusive club in the world.’

Norman, Benjamin Strong of the New York Federal Reserve Bank, Hjalmar Schacht of the Reichsbank, and Emile Moreau of the Banque de France had taken on the job of reconstructing the global financial machinery after World War 1.

From “Lords of Finance: The Bankers Who Broke the World”



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